Broken
by priscilla penn
Summary: She was always a happy girl with lots of friends, but now she is alone in a sea of people who she once thought of as friends. The worst part is these people don't know they aren't really her friends anymore. They don't even realize she's changed into a l


DISCLAIMER- JK owns everything of importance. This is merely a fic.

Broken-

Ginny gazed at the clock for the 500th time that weekend from the same place she had been every time before, bed. She had been in bed since classes had ended on Friday. No one seemed to notice or care about her absence that weekend. It was a Hogsmeade weekend and everyone was too busy going out and having fun with their friends to notice it was the third weekend that Ginny had spent in her bed.

She did of course eat, but not in the Great Hall. She only ventured down to the kitchens once during the weekend to get two meal's worth of food for the whole weekend. She barely even needed to bother with that amount of food since she was asleep most of the time.

If anyone had noticed her absence on the weekends, or her increasingly withdrawn nature in classes they didn't say anything to her about it. The truth was that no one ever really thought about Ginny unless she was physically there.

She had always seemed happy and bouncy all the time. People thought about her when she wasn't there they just never thought to seek her out because she was probably busy doing something else or enjoying another of her hundreds of friends' company or the company of whichever boy she had trapped that week.

None of them noticed that she was alone all the time. Ginny even had stopped enjoying people's company because she felt she had to seek it out or else it wouldn't come, and she had to be the happy bouncy person that she just wasn't anymore.

Part of the reason she wasn't anymore was of course the episode with Tom in her first year. She had been marked to suffer from that point on because once Voldemort touches you like that you are bound to suffer at least a little. Tom created the problem. He destroyed her ability to trust people and get close to them, but even then that hadn't stopped her from making and keeping friends.

She hadn't ever been popular exactly but people knew her and liked her and she never really had to try too hard to get a boyfriend when the hormones and desire to have them kicked in. She really had a lot of friends, until she realized she always sought them out. She realized a few months ago that if she wasn't visibly in the common room no one approached her. No one ever sought her out.

For a while she kept up her part of seeking people out and being bouncy and happy. She did have fun while out with her friends, but part of her just wondered if they'd notice if she stopped finding them to do stuff. She wondered if they would care enough to find her or how long it would take them to do so. She didn't want to stop being with her friends but she wanted to feel like they wanted her around, so she stopped finding them.

It was hard at first not to go running around Hogwarts to look for her friends to go play exploding snap or something else. She didn't sit in the middle of the common room anymore but chose an out of the way corner where she could see everyone but not be easily seen unless people were looking. She also stopped eating meals at normal times in the Great Hall. She would either come very early or very late to meals so that only a few people would be left and it wouldn't seem odd if she sat by herself.

After a few weeks of this she was livid. How could her friends and everyone else around her not notice her absence? How could they not notice this big change in her behavior? Sure she wasn't the center of the universe but some attention had to be paid didn't it? She didn't expect her brother and his friends to notice. They'd never really spent that much time with her to begin with so her not being around them wasn't new, but her other friends had spent almost all their time with her before.

Time passed and a few weeks of loneliness turned into months. She woke up Monday mornings to begin the torture of the week knowing people didn't really think about her. It was when Ginny started to wish Tom was back with her so that she could at least have constant company that she began to worry about the position she had put herself in. Ginny knew loneliness well now. Tom came to her in memories as did her former friends and she hated them, she hated Tom too, but at least Tom had always wanted her even if it was only her soul for his own life. What had her friends wanted? Entertainment, a caretaker, someone to hold them and comfort them when they needed it, someone who came to them when she noticed something was wrong? They didn't care for her that much was obvious. If they had they would have noticed her absence and done something about it, but they didn't even notice that she hadn't talked to them at all in months.

Ginny had never done well alone, so when she forced herself into this isolated state she suffered emotionally. She was social, extroverted and happy once, but now she was just a shadow in her room. Where her cheeks had once been fleshy and sunny, pale hollows now stood. Where bright vivacious honey eyes once were, sunken, sullen lifeless dark amber eyes lay on a bed of deep purpled circles. She was physically ill often now, but no one caught on to anything deeper than a cough. She went to Madam Pomfrey often for potions for her coughs and fevers. Madame Pomfrey noticed that something was amiss when Ginny started coming so often. Ginny was glad that someone finally took notice of her state.

She started talking to the nurse every few weeks when she came in with one minor illness or another. These conversations kept her spirit up enough to live, but she longed for friends that would care for her. Friends she once thought she had. She didn't know what to do to get herself out of her bed and back into her once happy social life. She needed someone to rescue her, but no one was coming. So she lay there broken until she could raise the energy to get out of the bed and the gloom she was in.


End file.
